These 2 awesome women have come up with a brilliant idea!

It starts with painting rocks and writing little messages on the back, then hiding them and sending clues about the location to your friends — like a scavenger hunt without the doorbell ringing, or Pokemon Go but without the cell phone.

Angela MacLeod and her friend Michele Cole invented the game. They aren’t the first to paint rocks — that has been going on since Neanderthal days — but after showing their artwork on pebbles to friends on social media, they came up with the hiding idea.

“We’re both artists, and we were kind of in the dumps a couple of weeks ago and wondered what we could do to make ourselves feel good,” MacLeod said. “I had been thinking about these rock ideas, so we thought we would paint a few and see how they turned out.”

Cape Breton Rocks. Photo Credit: Herald File

MacLeod painted smooth, flat rocks in the pointillism style, in which dots of colour form patterns as in Asian mandalas, or images of insects or animals as in North American indigenous paintings.

“The dot work is so addictive and so relaxing,” MacLeod said. “We just sat there and painted and painted. We stayed up for 10 hours straight, painting rocks.

“It’s like art therapy for us. We did it to cheer ourselves up, then said, ‘What if we start hiding them?’

She said, “There is a lot of camping on Cape Breton. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if people would get together and paint rocks, then go hiking and hide their rocks?

“That’s how it started. In the past week, we’ve just been working on rocks and hiding rocks and posting it on Facebook.”

Painted Rocks. Photo Credit: Herald File

The idea is spreading, MacLeod said.

“We’ve noticed it already on the FB page — people are tagging each other and saying, ‘Let’s have a painted rock party night’.”

MacLeod has hidden a few colourful rocks in Marion Bridge, where she lives, and another in Gabarus for a couple with two small children.

“They’re both lobster fishermen so I made a blue lobster and hid it,” she said. She then gave the couple a single, cryptic, laconic clue: 1714.

“With this game, you can be as detailed or as vague, or as hard or as easy as you want to find your rock.”

MacLeod said it’s fun for families to play at the beach. She also likes the idea of tourists stumbling on hidden rocks and carrying them away.

“If they find it, they can keep it,” she said. “I’m okay with that, and I’m sure a lot of people are okay with brightening someone’s day by giving them a little gift.

“It’s so simple. It’s so easy.”

MacLeod uses inexpensive paint from a Dollar Store. She recommends coating them with a clear sealant to protect them from the weather.

“If you can boogey around and spread some rocks around Cape Breton, who knows what will happen, right?”